There is, indeed, some force in such arguments. David Brin, the US writer and academic, argued in his 1999 book, The Transparent Society, that the unsurpassed opportunities for surveillance that technology offered us could be entirely benign.

He suggested, like Bentham before him, that there was nothing intrinsically wrong in encouraging people to give up their privacy if it was for their own good. In an ideal community, everyone would be watched and everyone would be accountable. This, he posited, could even be seen as a return to a tranquil and pre-lapsarian sort of life. The idea of anonymity, he pointed out, is "an illusion". In the village life of pre-industrial society, everyone knew everyone else's business, and this intimate surveillance offered a level of personal accountability that only technology could now return us to. All this, to critics of Labour's controlling and centralising tendencies, sounds impossibly idealistic. Interestingly, though, Brin would be the first to agree that this was the case.

He argues that, unless stalwartly resisted, "the biggest threat to our freedom is that surveillance technology will be used by too few people, not too many." He warns that a surveillance society run by bureaucratic edict will be too open to corruption. A truly transparent society trains its cameras, real and philosophical, on the people who are doing the surveillance just as mercilessly as it does on those who are being surveyed. In formulating his argument, he trawls back even further than Foucault managed, to assert that the essential question that needs to be asked was first put by the Roman poet Juvenal at the turn of the 1st century AD, in one of his most quoted maxims: "Who will watch the watchers?"